Evil Breed: The Legend Of Samhain

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All Rise...

Judge Mitchell Hattaway never thought he'd see a movie that wasted perfectly good porn stars like this one does.

The Charge

Cannibals wreak havoc on Jenna Jameson!

Opening Statement

Can you smell that? Smells like false advertising.

Facts of the Case

A washed-up former teen heartthrob and a bunch of porn stars get chased
around the woods of Ireland by a hungry, horny monster with a bad case of
psoriasis. It's nowhere near as good as it sounds.

The Evidence

Man, this movie is awful. Awful, awful, awful. It's cheap, dull, boring,
repetitive, illogical, and dull. (Did I mention that it's dull?) In the first
five minutes you get a sex scene followed by two killings, and then it's a good
forty-five minutes before anything else happens. Instead of getting what you
would expect from a movie of this ilk, you get interminable scenes of people
talking, people taking out the trash, people eating, people reading books about
Druids, people building fires, porn star Jenna Jameson attempting to act, aging
porn star Ginger Lynn Allen attempting to act, and Canada trying to pass itself
off as Ireland (ha!). Given that this movie barely runs and hour and change,
tossing in forty-five minutes of nothing wasn't exactly a wise move.

In addition to being a chore to sit through, Evil Breed is also
derivative beyond belief. Entire scenes have been cannibalized from other movies
and recreated in very clumsy fashion. The opening, in which former 21 Jump
Street pretty boy Richard Grieco and porn star Chasey Lain (who appears to
be heavily self-medicated) get it on in a tent before being slaughtered by the
evil creature that roams the woods of Ireland, is lifted straight out of Dog Soldiers, with a bit of The Evil Dead thrown in for good measure.
The scene in which many of the characters watch a horror flick while discussing
the stupidity of horror movie characters and the survival rates of virgins in
horror movies is a blatant rip-off of Scream (some of the dialogue is repeated
verbatim). To make matters worse, the footage the characters are shown watching
is a bastardization of a scene in one of the Halloween flicks. And the evil
creature that roams the woods of Ireland (identified as The Shape in the
credits, which is yet another insult to Halloween) looks like the result
of a drunken three-way between the Toxic Avenger, Sloth from The Goonies, and Lou
Gossett's character in Enemy Mine. If
there is an original idea to found here, I must have missed it.

Under normal circumstances I would jump all over the director for foisting
such garbage on an unsuspecting public. Problem is, this movie hasn't arrived
under normal circumstances. See, according to Evil Breed director
Christian Veil, he was hired to shoot a straight-up gore and sex flick. Well,
numerous things went awry somewhere along the way, and Veil was never able to
shoot exactly what he originally had in mind. Furthermore, the movie was taken
away from him during post-production, then rewritten and reshot. And, to add
insult to injury, much of the gore and sex was removed from the final product. I
wouldn't testify in court as to the validity of Veil's claims, but I do believe
him, and the deleted footage included here does lend credence to his some of his
assertions. (Veil, whose assembly cut is readily available as a bootleg, has
actually gone so far as to publicly apologize for this version of the movie.) I
just cannot understand why the producers chose to cut out what are essentially
the movie's only reasons for being. Did they really think that anyone interested
in seeing a movie titled Evil Breed: The Legend of Samhain wants
forty-five minutes of people doing little more than making coffee or riding
around in a Volkswagen van? (I forgot to mention these two examples, as well as
the following one, in my earlier rant.) Better yet, do they think fans of gore
and sex flicks are looking for meaningless shots of ducks in a pond? (I have no
idea why these shots are included. I just know that there are more ducks in this
movie than there are in Daffy's extended family.) Would a class action suit
against the producers be out of the question? I'm up for it if anybody else
is.

The movie does provide some entertainment, primarily in the form of several
unintentional laughs. Listening to Ginger Lynn Allen attempt an Irish accent
almost had me rolling on the floor. Halfway through her first line of dialogue
she forgets the accent, only to pick it up a few minutes later. Later on the
Irish accent suddenly morphs into an English one and then back. (Ginger also
gets to engage in some kick boxing and kung fu with the monster before she's
finally killed. That's good stuff.) In addition to looking patently absurd, the
monster moves around like a Sleestak hopped up on methamphetamines. The monster
lives in an underground lair, where he chains his victims to a stone slab before
killing them and eating them. Thing is, the monster has a habit of leaving a
knife on a table right next to the slab, which allows his victims to cut their
bonds and flee. Even more ridiculous is the fact that the monster left a frying
pan (huh?) in one of his lair's cells; the heroine gets trapped in the cell,
finds the frying pan, and uses it to beat the monster to death. (I really liked
it when the heroine was beating the monster to death and started thinking about
all of the people the monster had killed, including a character she had never
met!) Porn star Taylor Hayes has a scene in which her life slowly slips away,
the product of her union with the monster lying dead a few feet away, the
umbilical cord still attached. Taylor explains to the heroine why the monster
has been kidnapping women, although I don't understand exactly how Taylor came
about this information. I know the monster doesn't speak English, so I guess
maybe Taylor speaks Monster. When it comes to being an actress, Jenna Jameson
doesn't even make a convincing hiker, although she does get the movie's best
death scene, during which the monster slices open her right breast, removes the
silicone implant, and stares at it uncomprehendingly. You get Showgirls co-star Bobbie Phillips as a
college professor (ha!) who keeps pronouncing the word "Celts" with a
soft "C." (Bobbie and her students—all five of them—raised
the money for their trip to Ireland by selling candy and T-shirts. Okay.) And
then there's the ending, during which the heroine suddenly turns evil and
attacks the woman who has rescued her, which contradicts what has come before.
If the evil is transferable, why would the monster need human females in order
to procreate? (Veil claims this ending was written by one of the production
company's gophers and shot by a drunken director of photography. I believe him,
as this ending is just plain stupid as hell, and there's equipment visible in
many of the shots.)

The technical quality of this release is almost as atrocious as the movie
itself. The transfer is grubby, grainy, noisy, and washed-out; motion artifacts
abound. The sound is hollow and tinny; much of the dialogue sounds canned, and
there is no low-end or surround action in the track. (A few lines of Jenna's
dialogue seem to have been dropped from the mix, although I wouldn't call this a
bad thing.) Extras include a couple of previews, as well as the uncut versions
of two scenes. First up is the scene in which Ginger's cousin is killed by the
creature, who reaches up his ass, removes his intestines, and strangles him.
Then there's the full version of Jenna's demise, during which you get a few more
lingering shots of her chest, as well as a full-on shot of
her…uh…moneymaker.

Closing Statement

I still can't make up my mind. Should I feel sorry for Richard Grieco because
he's been reduced to making a god-awful horror movie with four porn queens, or
should I feel sorry for the four porn queens who have been reduced to making a
god-awful horror movie with Richard Grieco?